Health
Health and healthcare are at the forefront of disability rights issues. In these pieces, you’ll find insights on topics ranging from insurance and the need for systemic change within medical institutions, to the importance of self-care for your physical and mental well-being.
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- Media
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- Policy
- Race and Disability
- Relationships and Sex
- Sexual Harassment and Abuse
- Storytellers
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Why Aren’t More People Talking About Their Experiences with Vaginismus?
Content note: sex and sexual dysfunction, genitals, mention of gender and sexuality bias, medical settings and treatment, brief mention of past trauma I’m sitting upright on an examination table, my sore hip bones close as possible to the edge and…
Finding Sexual Health Care Shouldn’t Be So Difficult for Disabled People
The lives of people with disabilities are often medicalized, but our sexual health is mostly ignored. Doctors tend to be a big part of our lives, but they don’t ask about our sex life. You would think something like getting …
Lack of Insurance Coverage for Medical Marijuana Can Leave Some Users Behind
As a disabled New Yorker that relies on medical marijuana for pain control, I was so happy to hear that Gov. Cuomo recently signed a bill that decriminalizes possession of small amounts of marijuana. It would also crucially allow some…
My Family’s Normalization of Pain Made Me Believe I Wasn’t Strong
My three little toes on the outer sides of my feet curl inward so that when I walk I sometimes step on them. They look like calloused half moons. The skin is red and blistered. My body has adapted to…
Disabled People Deserve Better Access to Care for Eating Disorder Recovery
The first time in what was already a decade-long experience of anorexia that someone was willing to admit I had other disabilities, I was twenty years old. I was told I would be best served in an institution due to …
Showing Up in Public in a Disabled Trans Body
The first time I limped out of the men’s locker room and into the YMCA indoor swimming pool area without a rash guard covering my surgery-scarred chest, I felt queasy. I was certain it would turn into an 80’s high…
My Knowledge of My Body is Often Ignored When I Seek Medical Care
I walk through the doors behind the front desk of the pain clinic to room number four, the white-walled, two-chaired, one-tabled examination room that looks identical to the room I was in the last time I was here. I fill …
Slowing Down and Embracing Surgical Recovery is Still Living
I am working through one of those once a half-decade-or-so massive health shifts that folks with any chronic condition may find familiar: a rapid shift in function, surgery to implant more metal bits in me that set off alarms whenever…